TikTok is now banned in Montana
theverge.com
theverge.com
Here are the takeaways:
* It'd be easy for Apple and Google to prevent downloads of TikTok for most users, which would also include app updates, as they have a significant amount of knowledge of users' locations and could prevent most users in Montana -- even those using a VPN -- from downloading the app or updating it.
* It'd be very difficult for Montana to enforce the other piece of the TikTok ban -- if "entity" in the bill means any company, they're stuck: the state has little ability to prevent side-loading of apps on Android and users who want TikTok can access app repositories hosted out of state. There's virtually no way for ISPs inside Montana to surveil all user usage to find out if they're trying to download TikTok from a third-party repository, and even if they could there would be legal issues with the state mandating this.
Fundamentally, this makes user privacy and security much worse.
* Apple, Google, and ByteDance could be aggressive and use the data they have -- all three have GPS data for most or all relevant users here (i.e. TikTok users on an iPhone or Android) -- and block requests to download or use TikTok from within Montana. And they probably will, unless they get a court to block the bill.
The one thing the bill banning TikTok doesn't do is the one thing that is desperately needed: actually protect user privacy, by banning the collection, aggregation, sale, and use of fine-grained user data -- by ByteDance, Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other.
I don't know if it is technically and legally feasible in Montana, but you "just" need to block the endpoints that the app uses to fetch the data. It is not foolproof, but given that ByteDance probably has interest in keeping doing business in the rest of the USA, at least for now, it would be fineable in case it was trying to avoid the block.
They just ask any ISPs and telcos operating in the state to ban the URL.
Then you still need to update almost daily to keep using it.
90%+ users are never going to use apks. If this ban kills the network effect (the R0 of the viral infection), then the last 10% aren't going to last long either.
countries who engage in these bans have conditioned many non-tech people to learn to use vpns and other tools
"sideloading" is the norm on desktop too, btw, and always has been
As long as the overall platform is popular, it won't be surprising to see a lot of kids showing each other how to sideload.
I'd wager that if TikTok got banned in the US and Apple did not immediately follow with allowing sideloading, iPhone would quickly lose its status value in the teenage demographics. After all, status matters most when comparing equivalent goods - it's what justifies spending more for the same thing. In the scenario above, iPhone would immediately become painfully inferior to Android phones, along the dimension that matters a lot for the teenage cohort.
Bluesky is cool now because it's a gated community of privileged connected people, not because it's inherently better than Twitter.
You can order a nicotine vape online in most states and the only required ID is "confirming" that you are over 18. Doesn't detract from your main point.
Fortnite was excised from the Play Store a while ago; how much did that affect their existing numbers?
I wish there was a megacorp privacy story to run here, sadly, I'm not sure Congress will go for it.
There is only one solution and that is for TT to be 'forked' from ByteDance/Doyin. It would literally cost almost nothing, there are almost zero synergies between Doyin and TT at this point, they will do just fine separately, and it won't cost anything but a few bankers/accountants to do the split.
TT will have to be based in Singapore or US and be completely independent from BD/Doyin but that's fine.
Nothing will skip a beat, everyone can be happy, kids can have their app but CCP won't have any control visibility at all.
Funny enough, ByteDance could probably retain maybe even majority control, although that might not work in practices.
And then we can get on with trying to get Congress to protect consumers from Meta ...
And they have mechanisms to require it for certain app downloads e.g. adult content.
So they won't need to rely on GPS or VPN data.
I became disillusioned about hoping laws pass that protect user data after watching the TikTok hearing. The congressman questioning whether TikTok tracks eye dialation as a signal for "the algorithm", and the CEO having to explain that it's used for funny face filters, gave me second hand embarrasment. It reminds me of the Facebook hearing where a congressman ask whether it was possible to ban "finsta" and the Head of Global Safety at FB reponding that it's not a product. It's people having a secondary personal account limited to specific friends. An explanation the congressman was having a hard time understanding.
Regarding opinions about things like banning TikTok or protecting section 230, the divide is caused by bad technology literacy. I don't think it's fair to say it's been happening for a while, because the pace of tech development has been so much faster than legislature. The median age of the 118th congress is ~58 years old, broadband internet has only been around for the last ~20.
"The responses can have a variety of causes, from an involuntary reflex reaction to exposure or inexposure to light—in low light conditions a dilated pupil lets more light into the eye—or it may indicate interest in the subject of attention or arousal, sexual stimulation,[3] uncertainty,[4] decision conflict,[5] errors,[6] physical activity[7] or increasing cognitive load[8] or demand."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pupillary_response
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
He asks "Can you say with 100% certainty that TikTok does not use the phone's camera to determine whether the content that elicits a pupil dilation should be amplified by the alogorithm?"
Chew: "The only face data that we collect is when you use the filters to have sunglasses on your face, we need to know where your eyes are."
Congressman: "Why do you need to know where the eyes are if you're not seeing if they're dilated??"
Apparently I can only find primary sources of this hearing on TikTok itself, so: https://www.tiktok.com/@jamiethisyoujeffries/video/721387823...
https://youtu.be/_E-4jtTFsO4?t=8090
You can click the three dot menu next to the share button to pull up the autogenerated transcript or offical CC on c-span, on youtube. I don't think you can search in the yt app like you can on desktop/mobile. The comments section there speaks volumes about the divide between those congressman and younger generations.
I totally agree it doesn't do that and I want that, but at this point that is a major battle esp with how big tech have embedded themselves into govt.
This is a smaller battle won, and I hope it spreads. There's nothing bad about a multi-pronged approach.
I find this statement odd. It's one thing to have the data and another thing to assert that it's either readily available or easy to insert into legacy systems. Do you know this to be true? Or is this just a guess on your end? Because it sounds like a guess. And with guessing becomes weakened trust in what people "report" or "analyze".
What's good enough for an advertiser trying to sell concert tickets is not necessarily good enough for enforcing legal prohibitions.
The location collection mechanisms built by Apple and Google that would be effective at a state or regional level within the US have been built for advertising, with secondary purposes of opt-in anti-theft. They weren't built for continuous, rigorous enforcement of legal prohibitions within a given sub-region of the USA.
I think you're asserting that e.g. 90% of TikTok users in Montana would be impacted by the ban, and 10% would find a way around. For advertisers, that's fine. For enforcement of a law? Bzzzzzz! That's gonna be arbitrary-and-capricious'ed right out of the courtroom doors.
What will happen is this.
Teens will download a shit ton of VPN applications, the vast majority of which are specifically produced and marketed by the enemy to circumvent said ban. Then all users' phone traffic gets routed via the enemy VPN instead of just the social app's requests.
Win-win for both sides:
- the government gets populistic approval from the eldery population; - the adversary gets way more US users' data than they ever dreamed of.
Privacy? Data? Attention? Propaganda?
Huge fines for being caught knowingly serving ads to minors
If it's because of China, then ban TikTok and subsidize a competitor app - but be serious about it. Be ready to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on keeping the app free and servers up for years, sponsoring hundreds of content creators, dragging celebrities in to produce exclusive content, burning tons of money on all kinds of loss-generating marketing bullshit, like "publish a video from $concert, best 100 videos win a Nintendo Switch", for each concert in the state/country for the next few years.
Point being, if you can provide a TikTok alternative and make it extremely attractive, even if by literally giving away hundreds of dollars to each new user, then kids won't care about using TikTok anymore.
Now, if it's not about China but teenage use of social media?
Put an absurdly high tax on smartphones. Like 200%-1000%. That will make sure they become unavailable to a typical teenager.
Beyond that? I don't think you can do much about it directly, or in the immediate term.
Why waste the free labor?
What I’m getting at is this isn’t an issue for the state level.
Maybe at some point this was all going to hit some kind of threshold where it is just no longer reasonable to call the effects of social media a net good. Maybe TikTok has passed that threshold. We can give them a trophy for that, but then plan some ways to finally restrict social media's addictive and anxiety-provoking qualities.
So restrictions on infinite scroll, or require the user to actually press a button before the next video starts. I'm sure there are a lot of ideas, and people more qualified than me to suggest them, but I think these two alone would be reasonable restrictions.
It disturbs me that TikTok being a Chinese company is being used right now as an excuse as to why these social media platforms shouldn't be made to change their deliberately addictive designs.
Montanas politics are such that they you can’t find an OB to deliver a baby anymore, so any “free market” competitor needs to consider what random event will put them out of business.
Domestic competitors have already published their equivalents though, no subsidied required. It's not a very complicated app - they had clones up in months. Most popular Tik-Tokers already repost their content on these anyways.
Why do we need to subsidize naything? This already exists.
Because the problem presented here is: government bans TikTok, teenagers become experts at using VPN apps to work around the ban.
Social media apps live on network effects - it's near-impossible to compete with a well-established giant directly. But this also means that, if you manage to pull a critical mass of users over from your direct competitor, most of the rest will quickly switch too.
Therefore, the solution to teenagers overcoming the ban with VPN is to prop up a domestic competitor fast - pump money into it until it becomes more attractive to the kids than jumping through VPN hoops to get to TikTok. Once you get there, the problem solves itself.
(This is ofc. only for the scenario where the problem is China, not TikTok-style social media.)
I don't understand why it can't instead be: banning will make domestic alternatives more attractive since now you don't even need a VPN to access it.
Sure some teens will use a VPN and continue to use TikTok, but I'm not sure it'll be to such an extent that we'd be forced to concede that banning was the wrong call.
Also you can do both: ban and subsidize.
My argument rests on "social media is sticky due to network effects".
Which is why "banning will make domestic alternatives more attractive since now you don't even need a VPN to access it" if and only if the domestic alternatives are so good in comparison to figuring out VPN, that a critical mass of domestic users switch over. Ban alone won't make it happen - TikTok is too sticky for that.
Those are teenagers we're talking about. They're resourceful, motivated, have infinite free time - learning how to use a VPN app will be trivial for them, especially that "VPN" here doesn't mean Wireguard or ISO/OSI hokus pocus, but rather a turnkey app that requires about three clicks to make your US Internet connection look like it's coming out of Somalia. It's not hard for them - and will be even easier if a ban on TikTok makes VPN companies target the teenager market directly.
> Also you can do both: ban and subsidize.
That's exactly what I recommended.
I think given I don't use TikTok at all I am bad at intuiting how powerful its network stickiness is.
As said, you don't subsidize the app creation or use. The apps already exist. The users know roughly how to use them.
The solution would be to take the X biggest content creators and pay them Y Million dollars each to stop posting on tiktok, and start posting on the competitors. Everyone else will follow.
Because it's literally their job: Protect the citizen. They may not do a good job all the time, most times they are even very bad. But nonetheless do they try and prevent most of the worst cases. And TikTok is so insane efficient in what it's doing, the line between benefit and harm is so thin, it could easily turn into a "worst case"-scenario if people don't observe it careful enough.
As someone who thinks Unrestricted Warfare is one of the most brilliant books I have ever read, the idea most have not read this book in the US military is quite laughable.
Imagine people having no issue with the Soviet Union delivering a free daily newspaper to US teenagers in 1960. The level Americans have their head up their own ass is unbelievable.
That is not automatically the government's job. At least not in every worldview.
And these things exist on a spectrum. Protecting people from direct external threats is pretty unobjectionable to most philosophical systems that allow governments, but there's a lot more controversy around protecting people from themselves.
I.e. technically everything influences everything else, but some things influence others much stronger than the reverse.
My usual water-based analogy is that culture and society is like a water flowing downhill; economic situation (all the incentives people have) forms the landscape. Technology is what sculpts the landscape.
The flow of water does have its own influence - over time, it smoothens out rough edges, and can even forge its own path when the landscape is opposing water too hard. But mostly, the water conforms to the shape of the terrain. Same is with culture - it softens the behaviors of people following incentives, and can reform some aspects of the economy that just don't feel right - but mostly, the economy pretty much determines what culture develops, what people do, what people think. New technologies alter economic landscape quickly, but we don't have much control over when they show up or how the landscape is altered.
Let's say establishing policies to reduce the use of firearms in the population is the right move. What policies would you suggest?
(now, people are going to pop up with the obvious objections to those. What is it about US users of TikTok that suddenly makes the 1st Amendment and all those free speech concerns that people bring up not apply?)
The Prohibition did now work back then and only made the Mafia rich and made them push drugs when it was lifted.
We would be better served by a total ban on user tracking technologies.
1- https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/apps-are-selling-you...
The ones with the companies that buy all the data and give it to the government without the users ok. The others, which don't do that with a company but rather a government institution.
Can't tell which is the evil one.
I see. My current address, my phone number and something called my (public) arrest records are being sold to evil China at $10/pop. My phone number must be selling like hotcakes!
However, what would make sense is sewing discord amongst the plebs and fraying the few little ties that bind which would drastically shift the US stranglehold because it would invariably lead to schismogenesis and a legitimately fractured nation with dramatic reallocation of power and character. This may be affected to some extent by bitter rivalries in the body politic, but that would be secondary to breaking the nation.
But really it just reads like the Red Scare banter all over again.
I know this type of data can be misused in a variety of ways. Despite the fact that I can't exactly articulate how it might be misused in this instance, I choose 'default deny' because it reduces attack surface and the amount of unknowns that I have to contend with.
It seems you operate on a 'default allow' rule when it comes to this stuff, and you're welcome to choose that for yourself, but this is a minority position in today's distrustful world. It is very optimistic!
Me: Ok, what is your salary?
Them: uhh... let's change the subject
Often coordinating to target intelligence and political targets.
It’s a technological wing for a totalitarian intelligence department. That’s what it is. It also has social media functions, but it also has an intelligence function.
If you think “well the US does it too” well I invite you to move to Shanghai and live the rest of your days there and tell me you feel just as free as in New York City.
Also, two wrongs don’t make a right.
In what ways would your freedom be impacted in Shangai vs NYC?
Because I know or a fact I'd able to live a normal life in Shangai. Work, grow kids, go out and enjoy entertainment, have good healthcare and so on.
Is it the ability to vote your president that makes or break "freedom" for you? Well apparently ~40% of USAmericans have given that up as the average voter turnout in the US is ~60%. The vote you are offered in the US is a Hobson's choice, it's a choice between bad and worse.
if that's actually what you believe in, no difference. To most people the differences are obvious.
Hence no argument that you can actually explain, just a gut feeling driven by ignorance of what life in China is.
If you mean that I have 1 minute every few hours to come check here if you answered me, yes I do. The same is true of you.
Being afforded the opportunity to choose between a bad and a worse government gives me no hope, and apparently many feel the same in the so-called liberal democracies.
Just check this graph[0] at page 27. Am I the doomer or are about 40% of the world voters feeling doomed?
> brutal, genocidal autocracy
Brutal how? Genocidal is false as the whole Uyghur genocide has been proven over and over to be bullshit.
> assuming you're in the ingroup, stay in line, ignore meatfisted policy implications
lol, try to be openly communist in the USA and see what happens to your career.
.0: https://www.idea.int/sites/default/files/publications/voter-...
What about this false equivalency between China and the US? Even in a worse case scenario, data being taken by US intelligence is given SOME form of oversight. If you believe the US and China are similarly free, I invite you to tell me if you feel like you’re as free in New York City and San Francisco as Shanghai or Shenzen.
If you don’t think living in those two locations is equivalent, then why do you argue the data collection is the same.
If the problem is the behaviour of social media companies in general, legislate against that. Take note that it's not the conversation that's being had and that the people steering it have made their agenda, and ignorance, rather clear.
You’re right that there isn’t an equivalence though, the US is far worse.
You can get your digital cocaine as long as it’s safely sourced.
They’re not banning TikTok style companies (which would be similar to your analogy) they are banning TikTok specifically due to its origin and actions (intelligence collection).
The pot calling the kettle black.
You want to take away a first admendment right (imo) then you need definite proof that it's harmful
For one, the kids don’t really use TikTok that much and use a handful of apps. Different cliques used different apps more than others. They understood the geopolitical issues with TikTok and very few cared enough about TikTok in particular. They would all just use Reels or some other app more often.
TikTok is a far more inviting & engaging platform than Twitter at the end of the day.
The ban in china is a full Qing-dynasty-style suppression of free speech and the organizing of large-scale protest.
The ban here is due to concerns about data privacy because the users are not tech-savvy enough to consider that.
I don't think the later will force the users to resort to a progressive solution like vpn.
I think that censorship in China is a whole different and quite unrelated story.
Between Utah and Montana the awareness and use of VPNs is rising among the non-security-conscious, and this is a good thing.
Well, then, two things happened back-to-back. The VPN provider Mullvad was unsuccessfully raided, and Utah passed hyper-totalitarian laws. On the recent PR news, I investigated Mullval, and... they're fantastic. You don't have to use their app; they support straight openvpn or wireguard and are Linux native. AND I can pay them in BTC, further obscuring myself.
Because of Utah's law, the vast majority of my traffic is now directed over a VPN. I don't even really go to porn sites all that often. It's more the principle of it.
The more the state pushes to limit and remove freedoms, the more I will do everything in my power to push the other way. It's the Hacker Mindset =D
...but I still haven't bitten the bullet on a VPN yet.
See also: Monty Hall problem
I haven't actually seen anything about a Utah law yet, only the Montana ban of TikTok. What exactly does "hyper-totalitarian" mean compared to totalitarian, and what was the Utah law passed recently?
Guess I was expecting something a bit worse, I don't see how online age requirements will help but it doesn't land as "hyper-totalitarian" to me either. Feels like a less enforcement version of age limits on buying alcohol or cigarettes - a hit on personal freedoms but can't say I've ever heard those labeled as totalitarian.
Which is not really impressive since BTC can be tracked. What is impressive, however, is you can just mail them cash with a piece of paper with your account number on it and they will add that money as credit on your account.
You can either by BTC locally from an anonymous source, use a coin tumbler, or, in the BTC world you can do CoinJoins[1]
You would need to setup a new Apple ID/Google account with no credit card billing information.
And then deal with all of the inconvenience that entails i.e. no more paid apps, need to cancel subscriptions etc.
The only reason to use a VPN is when you want to hide your IP address from the other end of your communication. You get effectively the same service from public WiFi at a cafe.
Most non-technical people I hear talking about VPNs get them completely confused with encryption. VPNs do not hide the content of your communication: that is already happening with SSL.
Sounds like a money-printing machine.
Want to fight TikTok addiction or privacy issues with CCP? Sure, do it. But find other ways: banning users from using it, whereas especially everybody else can access it, is a huge punch on the rights of your own people.
The only solution would be to inform users that their data is funnelled to CCP servers in very obscure ways, that’s the only right thing that you could do.
Enable people to make informed decisions. Want your data stolen? Then go ahead.
The anti china/russia/<insert anything that's over GMT+3> seems to really be a WASP centric pathological obsession.
Just my 2c
The say "TikTok collects a large amount of personal information, which has raised concerns about data mining and potential misuse of user data." - what information they collect and Facebook does not collect?
I find it a much more sensible position to criticize both together, along with the rest of proprietary digital socialization platforms.
Something worthwhile noting here is that the usual "politicians don't understand the technology" sentiment doesn't apply here because our governor at least knows how to code Perl, and ran a software company.
Yes, or gathering information not blocked.
For example, you don't need iOS permission to get general location information (IP address), or device fingerprint.
Interesting! The more Perl people we can get into government[0] the better, for sure
Furthermore, it's unclear if the web app of Tiktok will be affected, or if it's only a ban on the mobile app.
Source: Am Montanan
EDIT:
S1: An entity violates this prohibition when any of the following occurs within the territorial jurisdiction of Montana:
(a) the operation of tiktok by the company or users; or
(b) the option to download the tiktok mobile application by a mobile application store.
Somehow, I feel like if California tried to ban Fox News - it would not fly.
This doesn't seem that different, though I personally find it amusing that it's coming from a conservative state.
I do agree TikTok is toxic trash - but I'd say the same about Fox News - and it just doesn't seem like something a state has the ability to ban.
GeoIP doesn't work because carriers (especially in Montana) tend to assign IPs from surrounding states as much as they do local cities. When I'm on the cell network, I'm regularly identified as coming out of Denver. Phone number area codes are equally useless, since half the folks I know here in Montana have area codes from outside states. GPS would be the best bet, though I feel like even that would have some major caveats (the use would have to be decoupled from the location services controls/displays, something they don't do for even their own apps right now).
Also, people rely on cellphones for emergency services. A manufacturer shutting down phones would probably expose them to some serious liabilities.
Credit card billing address.
Like any political group, there's a wide variety of ideas. Religious right folks get lumped together with constitutional libertarians, but have very, very different ideas on the proper limits of legislation and government power.
And yes, there are both idiots and brilliant thinkers in the Republican party (which !== 'conservative'). There are very good ideas, and abominably stupid ones.
Much like any group of humans.
Next you'll tell me that there have been presidents that haven't lived up to their campaign promises...
States rights isn't just for social-moral topics such as marijuana and immigration. We should have expected it to be used for other things as has historically been the case.
California et al just had a slight lead.
I don't see how owners of iOS or Android phones can be in any way said to be users of Apple or Google. At best this would apply to TikTok itself, or to companies which supply phones to employees.
So if someone inside Montana launches the TikTok app on an iPhone either an App Store (presumably Apple’s) or TikTok itself is liable for that violation.
I bet if you forced a 10 second boot time to the app you would reduce usage by 40%.
Someone needs to setup a nonprofit that will transport a user's phone to a free state and setup TikTok for a modest fee. The nonprofit could use the money to reimburse the women and transgender people who now need to travel to free states for some of their health care.
Isn't it easier and cheaper to use a vpn?
Information funnels don't work by such hyper rational actions such as 'going to a different state to do something'.
That won't happen.
TT use will fall dramatically, and given the nature of 'tipping points and critical masses' - it will change things.
The 'strategic' issue, is that this may be the US doing a bit of 'dipping toes in the water' in a small state, before taking broader action, which I think they will do.
Seems facially unconstitutional. Will maybe force a proper court decision on whether the Bills of Attainder clause applies to corporations.
Why are legislators so focused on banning TikTok, rather than regulating whatever it is that TikTok does that they don't like?
Don't like data about your constituents being in the possession of a company with ownership ties to the Chinese government or communist party? Do the work to describe what kind of 'ties' are the ones that worry you, what kind of entities are the ones you don't like, what kind of data you don't like being in their hands, and write a law that codifies that.
(edit - oops, see correction below) There's nothing in this law that would unban TikTok if its ownership were transferred to a US corporation.
States also can't regulate interstate trade, which I believe trying to penalize Apple and Google would constitute, since neither has a office in Montana.
> Section 4. Contingent voidness. [This act] is void if tiktok is acquired by or sold to a company that is not incorporated in any other country designated as a foreign adversary in 15 C.F.R. 7.4 at the time tiktok is sold or acquired.
If TikTok is transferred to a company not owned by China the act goes away.
So they could just do that, then reacquire the company and this law vanishes in a puff of logic.
This is the same logic that China uses to ban all western apps. Fortunately in the west, countries don't have rights, people do, and citizens generally have the right to run whatever software they want on the hardware devices they own. Governments that violate such rights get challenged in court.
Kinder Surprise were banned due to the letter of the 1938 FFDCA law as "non-nutritive object".
There's usually a regulatory reason, such as homologation on automobiles. There are some protectionist laws around types of automobiles that can be imported.
Fortunately this isn't a restriction on citizens.
Instead, is a law regulating businesses.
We have all sorts of laws, regulating businesses, all the time.
For example, very recently there was a ruling that allowed California to have food regulations for pork sold to its residents.
Do you think that this food regulation is some sort of huge infringement on citizen rights?
Because it isn't much different than other regulations that you are complaining about.
Well, it does if you think that TikTok is a national security threat.
> If you genuinely believe that TikTok should not be available to anyone
This statement of yours just means that you can't argue against the actual point, and instead have to make up a new one to attack, instead of the actual stated position.
The actual stated position is that we put regulations on businesses all the time.
And it is better to do that, than enforcement on individuals.
The reasons why it is better to do completely standard, and normal business regulations, is because if enforcement was on individuals instead, it would have to involve draconian things like checking everyone's phones all the time.
Nah. There is no need to do that. App store regulations are perfectly fine instead, and there is no need to defend some absurd position, that nobody is arguing, like that everyone's phones should be investigated by the government.
And this is no different than when California puts laws on pork businesses.
Except it doesn't. It's just that apps are required to follow local laws, and many companies - like Google - don't want to, because their entire business is exploiting users' privacy.
There are two issues with TikTok: privacy and national security. The latter is what this is about. (Related to e.g. our foreign media ownership rules.)
The federal legislation is trying to create an extensible system for forcing divestiture based on requirements you describe. This is more ham fisted.
We age gate tobacco, alcohol and even pornography. Is it impermeable? Of course not. Does it prevent Adam Mosseri from contemplating PornHub for Kids [1]? Yes.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/27/adam-mo...
Because a foreign company succeeded in the US. If Tiktok had simply done what the US wanted, and done a fire sale to a US company, Tiktok would be welcomed with open arms and there isn't a privacy violation the company could commit that would get it into real legal trouble. Tiktok would be deeply embedded in society and not having it would be like not having a telephone number.
The Tiktok situation is what US companies face around the world when they enter a foreign market and dominate (see: Facebook/Google and GDPR, or Apple being forced to allow other app stores on the iPhone by the EU). Those countries suddenly discover they have principles and vigorously enforce them. This is just the first time that the US has been walloped so badly in this game that it's been forced to discover principles, too.
Regulating what Tiktok does that they don't like is too hard, we might end up harming US companies that do the exact same things. So the lazy workaround is to make noise about the principles but then just target the company directly.
They're probably going to push the limit even farther the next time a big piece of legislation comes around.
Oh so now they've made an enemy of Google & Apples legal teams? Because those two aren't going to want to set a precedent for all sorts of bans across random jurisdictions.
I believe the second sentence answers the first, but not in the way the author intended. I'm not fundamentally insisting that we legally declare all data compromised until proven otherwise, but there is reasonable risk here that we cannot assuage.
As for whether SB 419 can be upheld: Eh. ~50 states, one of which is being used as a test here. Fine, that's one of the great benefits of the state+fed system. This is probing and forcing people to have the conversation, and that alone feels like this is worth it. Of course I 'sacrifice' Montana residents with this statement, which I arguably have no right to do.
Unless you're a legislator in Montana, you don't bear an iota of responsibility here.
Hmm, I think I do - A) as any bystander to any injustice, B) If I have more knowledge on the industry than the average person.
The Wall Street Journal recently published this article that I think shines a light on some major areas of concern.
“TikTok Feeds Teens a Diet of Darkness: Self-harm, sad-posting and disordered-eating videos abound on the popular app” [0]
— [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-feeds-teens-a-diet-of-da...
A law this specific wouldn't even be valid I'm my country.
> AN ACT BANNING TIKTOK IN MONTANA; PROHIBITING A MOBILE APPLICATION STORE FROM OFFERING THE TIKTOK APPLICATION TO MONTANA USERS
[1] https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1549/right-to-r...
But it's obvious that European countries have a concept of freedom of speech, just one you personally don't consider valid. But like the guy said, that's just, like, your opinion, man. That concept is defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international law, as well as the EU Charter, and probably whatever individual constitutions or bodies of law each country has. It was established before the US came up with the First Amendment, which was based on existing Enlightenment philosophy.
Examples from one of the larger still active blogs here: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=titles+site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fmoz.co...
There were also lists of headline swipe files that provided lots of templates.
(Manually removed in the meantime)
Thus most of the comments about HN's title editing system (software + mods) are about how awful and obviously terrible it is, and comments like yours here are rarities.
In the end this is all priced in, so to speak, to HN's system. The main thing is that the front page be mostly free of misleading and/or linkbait titles and gimmicks. pg used to describe it like this: we want the front page of HN to look bookish. That is, it should look interesting to people who like to read, and look boring to people who don't.
"Oh, a rabbit hole. I wonder where it leads?"
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/17/23727750/montana-bans-tel...
What if Apple protests and just disables their store in MT? It would only impact at _most_ 500k people (population 1mm at 50% market share, not accounting for demographics)
A huge number of angry Montanians who might vote their representatives out, but a rounding error for Apple.
If Apple did do this to help a foreign company (or any company), it would probably fall afoul of the law: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
> A firm's refusal to deal with any other person or company is lawful so long as the refusal is not the product of an anticompetitive agreement with other firms or part of a predatory or exclusionary strategy to acquire or maintain a monopoly. (emphasis mine)
IANAL, so I'm sure there are other laws I am not aware of that would squelch such a move.
Because then every state, province territory, etc., in the world will have an excuse. Since there are App Store users everywhere.
It's a lot cheaper to code geographic controls (that they already have for national-level jurisdictions) than to only temporarily boycott even only 100k paying App store customers.
There's a reason why no company has ever successfully done such a thing for any consumer product.
If phone users turn off their GPS location feature Apple can't be held accountable.
They will never shut down their store because of TikTok.
And some people might protest but everyone else will quietly switch to YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels.
I'm not convinced Apple or Google want to be in the business of state governments telling them what apps they can and can't sell. Although I do concede that they do this at the country level, so what's one more level of geo-restriction? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So, yeah. I guess it's time to shut 'em all down.
Now we just wait for the "I didn't mean American companies" retraction.
The 'current bill text' is this: https://leg.mt.gov/bills/2023/billhtml/SB0419.htm
And what it covers is:
Tiktok may not operate within the territorial jurisdiction of Montana. An entity violates this prohibition when any of the following occurs within the territorial jurisdiction of Montana:
(a) the operation of tiktok by the company or users; or
(b) the option to download the tiktok mobile application by a mobile application store.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/18/1176805559/montana-tiktok-ban
> Last December, Gianforte banned TikTok on state government electronic devices. On Wednesday, he added that the ban would expand to include "all social media applications that collect and provide users' personal information or data to a foreign adversary, or a person or entity located within a country designated as a foreign adversary."
Data misuse is real concern. But TikTok is not the main problem, it's industry-wide. A good Data Protection legislation that applies to all, and is applied to TikTok if they warrant it (and also to FaceBook, etc) and the next social media that starts up next year, would be much better. EU GDPR style.
If none of these companies can live with that, then so be it, shut 'em all down.
Judging by their positions and actions, they don't hate government at all. They love government. They just hate it when government doesn't enthusiastically support what they want.
Elected GOP officials are a completely different beast from much of their own base.
You wouldn't be able to get Republican support for reducing the power of federal law enforcement even if Joe Biden died and Kamala Harris became president. Maybe their paranoia would get sufficiently revived if they were facing a President-Elect AOC in 2024... but I'd rather not think about how they would behave under those circumstances.
The US has many problems, but I'd still rather live in its admittedly somewhat rough approximation to transparent liberal democracy than under a completely and explicitly unaccountable regime like the Chinese Communist Party.
It would be foolish to allow the CCP to abuse our liberal values in a way which undermines the security upon which liberal society depends.
I disagree. I think they're both roughly equally as bad.
> I'd still rather live in its admittedly somewhat rough approximation to transparent liberal democracy
Me too! I'm not sure what the relevance of that is, though.
Also I find it funny to the point of parody that China is the country under an unaccountable regime when they are signatories to the Hague System. The United States and Russian Federation are not, and the US goes so far as to have an affectionately nicknamed "Hague invasion clause".
In my lifetime the US has invaded several countries and replaced their democracies with friendlier governments. I'm not sure how we get to stand on any moral high horse about "liberal values". I'm not sure how leaving Libya with open-air slave markets is reconciled under said values.
I hope one day people can look at their own governments more critically than foreign ones, not least because our own government is at least on paper allowed to exist via consent of the governed.
CCP has extraterritorial police stations that regularly surveil the Chinese diaspora and have sent agents to assault individuals. It's particularly bad for expats with domestic families, expats are known to be challenged or coerced using the threat of harm to family members. It's especially bad for uighur and tibetan expats.
Here's the thing. The US has certainly done bad shit. By and large it reckons with it and is subject to corrective action. And we see the effects of that: The current administration (so far) and the previous administration have not started wars in any new countries. Libya was less bad than Iraq was less bad than Vietnam. The direction of us policy is getting better. The direction of Chinese foreign policy is getting worse and their domestic policy is trending genocidal, and there is limited internal dialogue and thus less of a forcing function for amelioration (Hard to make that comparison since CR policies killed millions more than genocide, albeit indiscriminately)
> I hope one day people can look at their own governments more critically
Yes, I hope that one day too, Chinese citizens can look at their country in as critical a way as us citizens can.
What kind of corrective action? The US has never faced any backlash for helping Brazil (my country) to maintain a dictatorship because of communism fears, for example.
An ad targeted at "young democrats" and sending targeted emails to "young democrats" has the same effect (one could argue that the ad would be more effective since it's less easily filtered out)
Within the USA, there might _possibly_ be sufficient technical infrastructure available to block app downloads at a national level. Maybe. And leaving aside the myriad circumvention routes.
But at the state level? It's simply not there in the way that the legislators think. Application-level data? Turn off location services. GeoIP? Nice try- mobile carriers don't reliably egress in the state from which the customer traffic originates. E911? Protected by other laws. Cell tower location? What about folks near state borders, and there's no reliable vehicle to get that data to app store operators right now anyway.
What's good enough for an advertiser trying to sell concert tickets is not necessarily good enough for enforcing legal prohibitions.
Effectively, to enforce this would require cooperation between government agencies, mobile carriers, and app vendors on a scale that has not be done in this country before- and with two of the three parties not even remotely interested in such cooperation.
This thing is pure political theatre.
My guess is that it’ll be based on the billing address of the account tied to the device.
If the billing address resides in Montana, the app won’t be shown for download.
Aside from that, yes, I agree. Tough to do, and mostly theatre.
Even on post-billed plans, getting the billing address from the mobile carrier to Google requires a degrees of cooperation that is not currently in place. Apple may have an easier time in the regard, but then again they're not likely to cooperate either.
But I don’t like this
That being said, TikTok's search capability is kind of useless.
If that's your thing
What's needed is EDUCATION...Cases in point.
The only way to "ban" illicit drugs is through education. Essentially, “don’t do that shit and here is why”.
The only way to "ban" abortion is, similarly, through education. Don’t screw but if you do put a coat on that thing. Make that stuff free.
Social media is no different. Focus on teaching the importance of privacy and mental wellbeing.
This education can and should start in your own household and families. Teach your kids, this ban won't help them.
I may be just crazy but providing geolocation and biometrics of 100M+ US citizens to Chinese government just does not seem like a good idea. Also keep in mind that TikTok has the ability to curate content you see. Social media in general have been found guilty of influencing elections.
Also, a web page can request your GPS permission just like an app can.
Yes, web page can request your GPS as well, that is true. But a webpage won’t be doing it while the user is not actively using the page.
Also remember when Apple introduced origination about reading users’ clipboard and TikTok was one of the first ones that got caught red handed? I’m not iOS developer but I would not be surprised if there was more the app can gain from users devices.
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/8/1/expanding-diskless-infr...
0 - https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/23rs/sb20.html
1 - normally, state laws go into effect at the end of the year or end of legislative session (depending on the state constitution) unless there is an "emergency" in which case it goes into effect the day it becomes law.
So, the way that it is enforced, is if the major app stores, do not remove TikTok, then they get fined a bunch of money.
> It seems TikTok would have no reason to pay for any fines from the state.
Well, ignoring the fact that this applies to app stores, companies can't just ignore court orders.
If they do, then their bank accounts could be frozen. US banks aren't going to ignore US court orders. Bank of America, or whoever, is going to give that money to the government, when it is ordered to do so.
I guess if Apple, and Google, want to shut down their US operations, then that would allow them to avoid the fines.
But, I expect they won't do that, and will simply remove those apps from their app store, for Montana residents.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-A/part-7/subp...
Will more countries ban Facebook/Twitter/Reddit etc?
It's technically a secret that they're going to sue but everyone already knows at this point so it's fine.
I suspect most neutral observers would say it's unconstitutional. But what they think does not matter.
Could be in the right position if US government bans TikTok.
Imagine selling a bespoke, turnkey solution to countries and companies around the world. Thinking about banning China from your Internet but your kids miss TikTok? We have something for you! On-prem, modular social media platform. Choose from ready made-modules:
- Interaction Styles - TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and many others.
- Regulatory environment - there's one for every major bloc on the globe! You can have your TikTok, and China can have its TikTok too! Comes with automatic GDPR support, updated daily to give access to latest discovered loopholes.
- Ideological Environment - a package of moderation, generation and monitoring tools, tailored to specific needs of your prospective users; choose from a wide set of ready-made configs - one for each major religious or political ideological group in every country on the planet!
- Monetization strategies - advertising? More advertising? Subscription and advertising? Pick and choose!
Let's do this! This is the endgame for social media and the Internet, so why wait for the world to go to shit, when we could drag it down to the gutter and make some money in the process?
> will take effect in January 2024
Something better than a ban is to fine TikTok in the billions of dollars each time it repeats these privacy violations and pay all its users back the data it has collected, just like Facebook has done when the FTC fined them in the billions.
That seems to be fair for everyone instead of this wanton reactionary cope with little action other than screaming in the comments section.
Are you imagining that telegram is owned by putin
Associated Press: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35984728
New York Times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35983933
Politico: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35984023
The Verge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35982447
NBC News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35982950
CNN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35982386
Wall Street Journal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35981578
And now Reuters too. (-:
Trade (especially massively imbalanced trade) with a communist dictatorship is not a good idea.
I guess we need more laws like this then to solve it, then.
- sent from my iPhone
Russia invaded Ukraine despite how tied they were to Europe economically.
To suggest China can't be an adversary just because we trade is a blunder made many times in history, and it fails, time and time again. Don't fall for it.
I think anyone who says they aren't is lying to themselves.
This is a far bigger trend than just some fox News viewers. Opposition to China has become bilateral and is very well supported by most in America.
You can only spend so long pretending to be a friend while also opposing the United States in basically every possible way until the United States wakes up and calls the quacking thing a duck. Seeing reality, we are burning bridges.
TikTok is one of those bridges. The chip export bans are another. Expect them to continue until China's trade with America resembles our trade with the soviets in the 80s.
Oh, I strongly agree with you there. This was obvious in 2013 as well.
Xi and his arrogant actions on the world stage have been a big help in creating opposition though.
Sure, maybe some people are warhawking but most of the concerned people are focused on trade dependence and worried that China will take over Tiawan's production as a last resort. Is that an unreasonable view? What happens if they do decide to do that? Just let them do it?
Yes, if the genocidal tyrants in Beijing were white we'd have no problem with them.
Notwithstanding that Japan already "has" plenty of nukes, they just happen to be on American submarines.
That is not why everybody thought war was impossible. The reason they thought war was impossible was the King of England, the Kaiser of Germany, and the Tsar of Russia, i.e. the major belligerents in WWI, were all cousins. They were Queen Victoria's grandchildren. Those weren't the only grandchildren on the throne who ended up taking up arms and entering the war. Given how a total of seven of the belligerents were related, including the 3 largest belligerents, nobody thought the family would go to war with one another.
They thought wrong.
All it means is that "the people of Montana really don't like China", but more officially.
I guess that's one way to describe the tense rivalry without completely calling your most important trade partner an "adversary".
China should fall pretty quickly behind Europe as well this year. China's economy has fallen off the cliff - 80% decrease in foreign orders, 20% official youth unemployment rate, 50% reduction in home prices, 80% decrease in government land sales
China is no longer a partner to US, but a competitor and adversary. To Europe and Japan as well. China made that very clear when they announced unlimited friendship with Russia last year.
It's Russia + China + Iran vs Europe + US + Japan + Taiwan + South Korea + Australia + Canada
To be clear, this was before the war and China has since walked it back a bit.
I do not find these figures to be credible. They would an indicate a cataclysmic, wartime level sort of economic collapse that I see no evidence of.
Since you post this kind of stuff all the time, I can't help but feel that you have an axe to grind. Not that I would blame you for hating the Chinese government, but still... are you sure that you are not being irrational about its prospects?
https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/highlights/t...
Consider the possibility that Greg Gianforte is angling for a cabinet job in a hoped-for future GOP administration, since his brash style is popular with many voters in that party, notwithstanding its sometimes criminal manifestation: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/12/532613316...
Random phone inspection?
And at the same time carry water for TickTock who is legally obligated to cooperate with China's intelligence service in any way they require. Knowing that the Chinese regime runs genocidal slave labour rape camps and will extract and sell your organs for free speech and religious practices.
I suspect that they don't realize that the CCP controlling the TickTock algorithms is more dangerous making the Q-anon shaman product manager for the algorithms at meta, Google, and Twitter.
My argument is that the regime that is carrying out the genocide is in control of the algorithms for a major social media company.
You perfectly prove my point when you have no problem realizing the impact on Americans control of a social media has in the case of Twitter, but are completely blind to the impact of TikTok.
Americans aren't oblivious to the genocide of the Uyghurs due to TikTok, they were oblivious before too. On the whole there's no impact on our daily lives from their plight, and as long as that's true it's going to continue having no bearing.
YouTube has radicalized people to jihadi terrorism and white supremacy, Facebook has promoted Rohingya genocide, Instagram is seemingly having a negative impact on depression and suicide amongst teenage girls... these are all problematic platforms regardless of regime... and that's before you get into more of the state-sponsored nonsense that the CIA and other do to spy on everyone regardless of which country they reside in.
That's not generally why.
But I do agree to this extent -- if we're to be banning Tiktok, we should be banning all social media companies, foreign and domestic, that do the same as Tiktok does.
Why do we allow China to run their social media apps in the West whilst they block all foreign apps within their own borders?
How is this remotely acceptable?
However it's good that we are finally responding to the unfair market conditions imposed by the Chinese government. Western app devs do not have the same access to the Chinese market as Chinese app devs have to the Western markets.
At the time the amendment was conceived, it was unimaginable to have a nation-wide entity that threatens the freedom of expression other than the government. So, it may actually be in spirit of the First Amendment to control the entities which promote and censor public discourse according to their opaque internal algorithms.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
There is nothing there that explicitly grants private enterprises the right to store, sell, and manipulate your free speech.
... because the Constitution limits the government. It doesn't grant rights to private enterprise or the people (of which private enterprise is a superset.)
Note the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which explicitly state that the rights listed in the Constitution are not exhaustive, and that all such rights not enumerated in the Constitution are granted to the states and the people.
So the right of private enterprise to store, sell and "manipulate your free speech" (which is just a bad faith framing of moderation as a violation of civil rights) is implicit to the right of free speech itself, a right which is neither defined by, and which cannot be limited by, the First Amendment to begin with.
Although yes, there are limits even within the US, those limits are usually very strictly scrutinized. Banning all major social media platforms because "They play a major role in exacerbating the divisions in the society and the rising suicide rate" on the basis that the Constitution doesn't explicitly say you can't is blatantly contrary to the spirit of the First Amendment and the whole philosophy of free speech in American law.
That’s wrong on the Ninth and Tenth: the Ninth Amendment says that enumerated rights don’t limit other rights of the people that exist (the purpose of this was that the Constitution wasn’t a “blank slate” document, there was law existing before it which established rights, and Ninth Amendment was to make clear that the Constitution did not extinguish them, it doesn’t give anything at all to states; the Tenth Amendment, which does address states, says all powers (not rights) not granted to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved to the states or the people.
> So the right of private enterprise to store, sell and “manipulate your free speech” (which is just a bad faith framing of moderation as a violation of civil rights) is implicit to the right of free speech itself
No the right to conduct commerce that relies on doing this is not inherent in either the First Amendment nor is such conduct of commerce, insofar as it has an interstate character, protected from federal regulation by the 9th and 10th Amendments, because regulating interstate commerce is an explicit power of Congress.
Particularly since, if that were the case, porn would have been banned under that rationale ages ago. If free speech protects the likes of Larry Flynt and Vice it obviously protects Facebook and Twitter.
The authors believed in natural God-given rights. They didn't want a certain rights being legally enforceable to give moral carte blanche to everything else.
The legal applicability of the Ninth Amendment is similar to that the Preamble.
> One of the arguments the Federalists gave against the addition of a Bill of Rights, during the debates about ratification of the Constitution, was that a listing of rights could problematically enlarge the powers specified in Article One, Section 8 of the new Constitution by implication...This proposal ultimately led to the Ninth Amendment.
> Professor Laurence Tribe shares the view that this amendment does not confer substantive rights: "It is a common error, but an error nonetheless, to talk of 'ninth amendment rights.' The ninth amendment is not a source of rights as such; it is simply a rule about how to read the Constitution."
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
What's the alternative interpretation? A blank check to SCOTUS to strike down Congress citing whatever "rights" they thought of that morning?
Of course not, and thus Ninth Amendment has virtually never been cited in a (successful) court decision. For the simple reason that it doesn't state anything actually enforceable by the courts.
The business model is what would be at risk, not Facebook's free speech.
http://laws.leg.mt.gov/legprd/law0210W$BSIV.ActionQuery?P_BI...
so let me kick it off then. What exactly does this mean? To illustrate my point, let's change the scenario. There's a small town north of Chicago called Skokie. 100k people. Lets say they pass a "law" to ban some app from Google's play store.
People in Montana should perhaps take their phone, ask it what a computer is, listen to Siri's answer, then call 411 and ask them how to open a pdf. Then they should shovel some cow dung - as is daily life - and finally then they can pass some laws about cow dung.
And now this, from the Australia lawmakers. Australia, the Montana of the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VB3uQHa14g